Maybe Music

I've been sitting here looking at this picture and wondering if I have anything to say, during which time I have been texting with Q and Ili about Steve Gunn.  Ili played Gunn for me last night on a drive, and I said he sounded like a pop version of Kurt Vile.  Q just clued me in that they have played together.  I listened to that and didn't like it much.  But I do think that this album would be fun for a road trip.

I think I've given you a link to the full album here.  It may not be good for you.  That is the way with music.  You think you have something in common with someone and then you start sending one another songs and you're like, "What the fuck?"  It is disturbing and you do not know if you can really like this other person anymore.  Music is the great divider.

So if you don't like this. . . well, who knows, I probably won't in a month or so, either.  It is like reading popular fiction.  I just finished reading "Sweetbitter" and enjoyed it but wondered who would be reading it in ten years.  I listen almost exclusively to old jazz and have for quite a while now, and I find it difficult to listen to most other things.  It made me happy that I could listen to this Gunn album.  I was getting scared.  But you know what Gunn will be playing one day?  Standards.  They all do.  Why?  Because they begin to understand and appreciate more complex scales.  The initiate has a difficult time getting an ear and heart around them, but one day. . . .

And so with literature.  Q blames me for making him read Bukowski, but he's been dead awhile and people are still reading him.  And they will be for a long time.  Funny, fucked up old Bukowski.  There was a beauty in his simplicity, though when either Mailer or Capote said he wasn't a writer so much as a typewriter, they were not far off.

But enough of that.

It is Saturday, mid-summer, the weather hot, my interests short.  I lie in bed and read away the brutal afternoons.  I must go now and do all my chores in the more temperate morning.  By two, I will be back in bed with a book and a glass of wine.  The roads will be melting, the town a people-less set.  Bed or beach are the only solutions, and I have only one.  And so. . . the day.